Month: July 2012
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Off The Grid
This chart published over on The Atlantic shows how out of kilter the US is in not requiring companies to give their staff paid annual leave. Almost worse than that is the fact that, according to a JetBlue/Harris Interactive study, no less than 57% of Americans ended up not using all the holiday time they were…
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Mobile Love
This is fascinating. Eric Barker quotes from Martin Lindstrom's book Brandwashed when he suggests that rather than being addicted to our phones, we're actually in love with them. When our phones go off, fMRI brain scans apparently illustrate a flurry of activation in the brain's insular cortex, which plays a key role in functions usually linked to…
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On The ‘Death’ Of Online Advertising
I've lost count of the number of articles I've read over the years declaring the death of online advertising. The reasons cited usually touch at some point on banner blindness, falling click-through-rates (the average CTR having dropped to less than a tenth of 1%), and the uneven distribution of clicks (Comscore's 'Natural Born Clickers' study for…
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Robo-Pricing
There was something of a kerfuffle recently when it became public knowledge that travel website Orbitz were recommending different price ranges of hotels based on the user's operating system. Data mining had told them that Mac users typically pay a premium of upto 30% on a night's stay so they were using data to improve…
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Stamen’s Watercolour Maps
Thanks to a tweet from Tom Uglow, I happened across these wonderful watercolour maps from Stamen design. I've long been a fan of Stamen's visualisation work. They were one of FastCompany's 50 most innovative companies last year and have done some great work with MTV, MSNBC, BMW, Digg and LOCOG which I'm a fan of. But…
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Post Of The Month – June 2012 – The Vote
Thanks for the nominations. Two double nominations (David Hepworth twice, and Paul and Len in the same nomination) this month. So, our vote is between: Off The Page – David Hepworth on Magazines and Beyond What Closing A Magazine Tells You About Why You Had To Close A Magazine by David Hepworth Len Kandall’s and Paul Isakson’s Hierarchy Of…
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Post Of The Month – June 2012 – Nominations
It's time to nominate the best posts you have read in June for Post Of The Month. I have a somewhat eclectic mix that make up my starter list this month (you'll note as well that I've included a double nomination as Len and Paul's posts were closely related), but please do add to these in…
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Should Media Companies Mentor Startups?
Large companies starting mentoring schemes for tech startups seems to be becoming a thing. The latest example is an initiative from BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the beeb, to create a six month mentorship programme for digital startups and emerging digital media companies with the aim of helping them to gain traction and scale…